


to ask for your hand (i just pray that it's mine)

by closertoheavenn



Category: Ammonite - Fandom
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Post-Film, but I hAVE FEELINGS ABOUT THESE TWO, honestly i started writing and never looked back, i started writing this immediately after watching the film, literally wrote this instead of sleeping, so i wrote this at 2 am, so it's probably not that good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:21:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27920692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closertoheavenn/pseuds/closertoheavenn
Summary: Sheburnsand you have always been cold – you should have known that this would be how it ends.(It always does.)//or: Mary finding Charlotte again, and herself, too.
Relationships: Mary Anning/Charlotte Murchison
Comments: 13
Kudos: 105





	to ask for your hand (i just pray that it's mine)

She _burns_ and you have always been cold – you should have known that this would be how it ends.

(It always does.)

//

You stay the night in London, with Charlotte. It feels like a culmination of some sort, and it is.

She apologizes for having been so utterly ridiculous, and then she cries and cries and cries – you do too, and quite a few other things, many times over.

The early sunlight is already seeping through the window, golden rays cover Charlotte’s face, lighten up her delicate features, after you’re done.

“You have to know that I’m going to miss you terribly,” she mumbles, tracing her fingers delicately over your breasts. 

She places a soft kiss on your collarbone. “I wish we could stay like this forevermore.”

“Me too,” you decide, you kiss her on the lips.

(Like fossils, you marvel.)

//

The skies in Lyme are characteristically grey, dark and gloomy after your return. You settle into some sort of routine – the mornings are mostly spent on the beaches, searching for fossils (if the weather is kind enough to let you), the afternoons in your shop, the evenings by drawing and cleaning the stones you found on the beach that day.

(The nights – )

(The nights are mostly spent staring at the ceiling in the dark, feeling tired in places sleep can’t reach.)

Every once in a while, you visit your mother’s grave. You give her some fresh flowers, you say a little prayer, you wonder if there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely.

//

In the begin of September, you find an almost entirely complete plesiosaur skeleton. It takes up most of your evenings for the rest of the month – the carving, the cleaning, all of the meticulous effort it takes to dig it out.

On a particularly rainy afternoon, you finish cleaning the fossil. You treat yourself with fresh strawberries from the market, sit down in your chair in the kitchen, and let yourself be proud of your accomplishment.

The fossil stares back at you – stark, rigid, unfazed. 

As you put the very last part of the very last strawberry in your mouth, you wonder what Charlotte would think of it.

//

She must be thinking of you too, because she writes you a letter. It’s short and sweet and you can smell her perfume, sprinkled onto the page. It’s the silence, the things left unsaid in the letter, that speak the loudest.

Love was short, you think.

(But silence is the longest, you think then. You will never be able to forget how she understood your silence, almost better than you understand it yourself).

She writes how much she misses you – something rather poetic, about bodies woven together, about yours being like a limb to hers. 

This is the paradox that you’re left with after it’s all said and done: she loved you both selflessly and selfishly and you can’t love her either way.

(On the bad days, you wished you could love her as selfishly as she loved you. But you are simply not cut out to be locked up and stored away as a treasure and you know that you would never force her to love you as selfishly as she loved you. You would never ask her to throw away her life and come live with you like an animal trapped in a cage – you’re not conceited enough. 

On the worse days, you wish you were.)

(On even worse days, you wished you could love her as selflessly as she loved you. Charlotte burned like the sun, searingly hot, _blazing_ , golden in her light – her love was so full, so warm, so incredibly whole, surely you could have drowned in it all. 

You are simply not cut out for a love that would surrender everything for you, when you’re too afraid you can’t give her anything to offer in return.

All you have is your sorrow, your coldness. She deserves so much. You are not enough for her.

On the worst days, you wish you were.)

//

You buy a new dog ornament, one for your mother.

It’s nothing but a pathetic excuse to not feel so _fucking_ lonely anymore.

//

The winter in England is cold and unforgiving. It reminds you of yourself in a rather equivocal way.

You now understand what Charlotte meant in her letter: you miss her so much that the missing has created a body of its own. This body, however, is not warm and soft like hers. This one is frigid, cruel, bitter.

Your sleep with three blankets on the bed these days, yet the cold still bites. 

You miss her smell, her breathing as she lay next to you, her sunlight, how you could bathe in her warmth.

(You lie awake at night, with chattering teeth, and think of all the things you’ve ruined: your relationship with your mother, with Elizabeth, with Charlotte.

You think: perhaps I ruin things, just to see if I can live with it.)

//

You should meet in another life, you contemplate. 

A universe in which you can give her everything she desires and in which she doesn’t desire too much for you, from you, with you.

(You were eleven years old when your father died; you know what sorrow and sadness are. But now you realise that the absolute loss of a person isn’t even half as excruciating as the relative loss, where all you have are bits and pieces, but never the entire person, where it’s just a matter of _“wrong time, wrong place”_ , where it doesn’t end the way you want to simply because you both desire something the other can’t give you, not because the other person isn’t there to give it to you anymore.)

//

In January, Charlotte announces in one of her letters that her husband is going away for a work trip.

Four days later, you receive another letter. _Would it be okay if I were to visit you?_

//

You open the door and her smile is –

Your first thought about her is that she is _golden_ , her eyes, bright like morning stars.

You don’t remember what you thought after that, because she pushes you back against her, looks at you with ferocity in her eyes, leans you plaint against the kitchen counter, drops to her knees, pulls up your skirts and opens her mouth against you.

The silence after you orgasm is infinite, the loudest silence you’ve ever heard.

//

You want to ask her how long she will be staying. You never do, which sounds crueler than it is.

(It’s not a matter of cruelty, it’s a matter of want.

You know she would stay forever if you’d ask her to.

She has a life in London, a husband, girlfriends, acquaintances, perhaps a child, soon. You are not like her, not selfish enough to force her to give up her life for a life with you. You are also not selfless enough to let her stay with you anyways, despite all of the above, because you are someone who has nothing left to give her.)

(It’s a matter of _want_ : she wants everything and you simply don’t want anything enough.)

//

Still, you try to ask her, one day, because she is just so –

It’s a late afternoon and you find Charlotte singing softly in your kitchen, when you come back from the beach.

“Making yourself at home?”

Charlotte smiles lightly as she slides two plates onto the wooden table.

“Your kitchen is quite nice,” she replies, shrugging. “And I’ve finally learned to cook.”

You sit down in the chair and light a cigarette. “I’m glad you’re here,” you tell her, and you intertwine your fingers. “Thank you for being here.”

You want to ask her to stay. The words are so easy, almost tangible, almost something physical on your tongue, something like an ammonite, something you could dig out from the clay with your bare hands, something –

(You’re not brave enough to be selfish. You can’t ask her to come live with you, you would never do that to her, you would never keep her here when she has so much left in London to come home to.

You’re not brave enough to be selfness for her, either. You’ve torn yourself apart too long and too often and there is simply not enough of you for her to love anymore.)

You don’t ask her to stay. You are quiet and eat your soup, instead.

She returns to London two days after that. It shouldn’t sting, but it does.

// 

It goes like this for a while: she visits you every other month, stays for a couple of days (a week, if you’re lucky), she returns to London, repeat.

Time passes, yet things stay the same.

(They don’t stay the same entirely. 

After all, after love, no one really is what they were before.)

//

Then, in the midst of the summer, Charlotte’s husband passes away. 

_Tuberculosis_ , Charlotte writes in her letter. _The funeral is tomorrow. Can I come see you after?_

(Your mother always said that every end of something is the beginning of something else.

You always thought that was rubbish, but now you think she might have been right.)

//

Charlotte comes to visit you again, kissing you square on the mouth as a greeting. She has brought more than one suitcase this time and you wonder if this is a visit like all the previous ones or something else entirely.

You walk the shoreline together, hand in hand, which is something you’ve never done before. Her hand is warm in yours.

“He was a good man,” Charlotte says, looking out to the sea. The sound of the waves rolling onto the shore drown out her voice. “I miss him.”

You nod.

She stares at you.

Your heart skips a beat.

“Not like I miss you, Mary,” she says, then. “I want to stay with you, if you’d have me.”

Your eyes widen. 

“You don’t have to decide right now, I wouldn’t do that to you,” she assures you quickly, “Not _again_. I just wanted to let you know.”

(It’s not nothing, but you are not sure it’s something either.)

The rest of your walk is silent. How wonderful it is to be silent with someone, you think, how you are only lonely when she isn’t there to be silent next to you.

//

She teaches you how to play piano, you go looking for fossils on the beach, she cooks for you, you spend a lot of your time drawing together, you buy her flowers, she starts to feel like someone you would like to come home to for the rest of your life.

Some days you are still terrified of losing her, other days you are even more terrified of having her.

But the line between selflessness and selfishness blurs over time, alters, widens.

A lot of things start to change, slowly but surely, and her love transforms segments of you into a fossil.

“It’s more romantic than it sounds, I promise,” you tell her, and she starts giggling. 

“You really are the charmer, aren’t you?”

It’s true, you confess to her, parts of you fossilize. She is turning parts of you into stone, the parts you don’t need any more and she reassures you that the other parts of you are perfectly sufficient for her to spend the rest of her life with.

“Perhaps those parts of you are for someone in the far future to find on a beach,” Charlotte laughs, and you laugh with her.

The sound is –

//

Five months and three days after her husband’s death, you ask her to stay with you.

You take her out to the beach, put her down in the water and you say, “I want you to live with me. Forever. Please say yes.”

She laughs and cries and screams a little bit and then the two of you make love right there, in the cold and salty water, and it’s _everything_.

//

Some other things stay the same. 

She is so confident in loving you, so pure, so bright, she loves you exactly how she has always loved you, so selfish and yet so selfless and she’s _everything_ and more and it exhilarates you, but it doesn’t terrify you like it used to anymore.

This is how it ends: she rises in your silence and in turn, her sunlight burns your fears away.

Because in the end, your silence is enough for her. 

And you ask for her brightest skies in return, the ones moving forward, so you will always be able to share her warmth, and you grow old together.

**Author's Note:**

> okay so i have absolutely no idea what this is lmao but thanks for reading anyway!! let me know what you think!


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